Thursday, June 29, 2006

4 jobs for Bob and 2 blows for Labour

...are the results. Laptop perched on knee in bathroom watching News 24 via wireless...a new pemutation of my early morning election result watching. BBC describe Bromley as "extremely close":

Bromley: Tories: 11,621; LibDems 10,988, 633 majority. Well done Team!!!

Labour 4th in Bromley and C.

Bob 'personally disappointed' and refused to thank all candidates: 'vicious...unpleasant...under-handed...cynical...personal abuse'...not bitter then!

"You smell" is personal abuse. "You've got three jobs and want a fourth", isn't.

8 comments:

  1. I haven't the faintest idea who they are, politicians always look and act very much the same to me, but the title is absolutely brilliant!

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  2. Thank you very much. The "ooh-missus" double entendre in the title was not intentional at 3.10am and did not become apparent to me until 8.31am. Apologies to any horses I may have frightened.

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  3. I wonder what the views of those making hay out of Neill's "three jobs" are towards the fact that a LibDem member of the London Assembly is also a Peer and local Councillor.

    Is that also many jobs?

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  4. In the cause of fairness I should say Graham has responded directly:

    http://www.mayorwatch.org.uk/news.php?article_id=320

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  5. Martin, thank you for your comments and, indeed, it was very fair of you to include the link to that very comprehensive reply from Graham Tope.

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  6. Well I like to be fair and, just to clarify, I'm not a Tory just someone highlighting an issue many of our readers have mentioned on the forum/in the blog and where there seemed to be an instance of the party saying one thing and doing another.

    Graham answers those suggestions very directly and it's then for people to make their own mind up.

    That's what our site is about - I can honestly claim the site has no political bias but if it did it wouldn't be anti-libdem!

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  7. People do seem to forget that the Liberal Democrats had selected their candidate Ben Abbotts, long before the Conservatives had (perhaps reluctantly) chosen Bob Neill.

    As such, Ben's campaign had begun prior to the Conservatives choosing a candidate, therefore couldn't have levelled any attack against him. So, I do dismiss such allegations of personal attacks, given that for part of the campaign, the Conservatives were indecisive in choosing, then backing their candidate.

    The literature the Liberal Democrats put out, had a very clear message on policy: what Ben would do to tackle crime from our crime survey (i.e. a man stabbed in the head with a screwdriver a few weeks ago), the improvement of the NHS locally (currently in financial meltdown), transportation - the state of the trains and their stations. That Ben was already a local councillor, providing action on the Environment at Bromley Council. I think the literature provided an extremely good balance.

    It informed people of the facts. Labour could not win, it was a 2 horse-race.

    Everything we said was true and either has or is yet to happen.

    We were sensitive. We could have mentioned the fact that Eric Forth never held surgeries. That he was inaccessible, and simply didn't represent the people he was elected to serve in parliament. That the reaction of Eric Forth to letters was to patronise his electorate. That Eric Forth was extremely disruptive in the process of debating private members bills.

    I believe the newspapers finished it all off. In a Tory stronghold, an article about the possible invalidation of Bob Neill in the Daily Telegraph, can't have gone down well, and as such, our mention of his 3 jobs, simply compounded his fate.

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  8. Alan
    Thank you for your very fair comments and for all your hard work at Bromley.

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